Ordinary Decay

Every morning since it happened
I wake up apneic,
And though my brain will remember to tell my lungs
To keep going, keep working
It is not time to end this yet
I still force myself to throw up
The water I've been subsisting on for two weeks
Into the toilet, to remind myself yes, you are still alive
The world has not ended with your melodramatic obsession.

And yet I still cannot erase the need to repeat the daily affirmations of Alcoholics Annonymous
While I do my makeup in the mirror,
Even though I am hardly able to hold two shots of whiskey
It nevertheless seems quite appropriate
Because you are my disease and I cannot stop your parasitic lies
From latching onto the heart in my throat
Or these compulsive text messages,
Handjobs given in your truck at 2 a.m.
Phone calls where I listen about her.her.her. and
Try to talk you out of suicide,
While my bony fingers are on my own trigger

And I won't tell you about it

I won't tell you about it

So to hell with you and the denial you finally spilled
Out onto the table
And promises you don't care to keep-
Because how careless,
How oh so careless we are
(And if only this were a love poem
For someone else(

If only you were the version of yourself I have created in my head
Because this heartbreak does not satisify me near as well as the delusion.

Yet you are still a terrorist threat
Like you have been since you told me hello for the first time
On Christmas Eve
And I cannot turn your your incessant ramblings
Into a morality monologue against the universiality of teenage mistakes
When my own poor judgement is still not disppearing
With the bangle of my bracelets
But settles onto me like the cigarette smoke clouding
A second skin preparing me for an adulthood of ordinary decay
And Hallmark cards that are the proper sympathetic equivalent
To the razors I'm running down my thigh.

-fin.